3/26/12 – I had threatened to do this for a while. I am now posting a small selection of images from last summer’s Library Road Trip. The previous images on this blog were all quick recording shots taken with my little Canon G-10 at the same time as I was shooting my larger film cameras. The final shots were all on film and I have never posted these before. I am doing it now because I finally finished developing and spotting the 300+ images that have been edited from the trip. Finally, these pictures can begin to see the light of day. I selected these fifteen images to be somewhat representative of the diversity of libraries we encountered last summer.

Things are progressing with the book project. We are actively looking for writers to be included in the book and I will let you know how it goes. Any suggestions of writers that you think would be appropriate would be greatly appreciated. I just received a wonderful hand-written letter from Wendell Berry. It was a rejection but I am going to frame it anyway.

This summer will be the last of the Library Road Trip field work. Walker and I will do our last tour through the upper Mid-West including Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado. This is the last region in the country that I have not yet photographed for this project. We will do it more or less in this order and plan on spending four weeks on the road starting around June 12th. If you have any contacts or suggestions of libraries to photograph or places to stay it would also be much appreciated.

After I get back from the trip in mid-July I will spend the rest of the summer developing and editing the film, working on the book and getting ready for a big exhibit of this work at Stanford University’s Art Gallery. That exhibit is scheduled for the winter of 2013 and will include work from the 2011 and 2012 summer Library Road Trips and my recent short trip to southern Nevada and Utah. It will be a good way for me to focus this new work. In conjunction with the earlier exhibit produced for the San Francisco Public Library during the spring of 2011, I hope to produce the core of a traveling exhibit that can tour around the country for several years. That traveling exhibit, in combination with the large-scale book will be the final expression of this massive project. But I have miles to go before I get there. So many libraries, so little time. Stay tuned.

Public Library: An American Commons

I'm photographer Robert Dawson. Join me and my son, Walker, as we drive across the country this summer photographing public libraries for my next book, due out in 2013. Our trip will complete 17 years of field work documenting this precious American resource.

For more on my work and my upcoming American Public Library photography book, please visit robertdawson.com.

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